Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism (20 page)

In the second place, much religious belief does not represent a form of mental weakness but rather the healthy functioning of the biologically and culturally well-adapted mind…. Adaptation is the gold standard against which rationality must be judged, along with all other forms of thought. Evolutionary biologists should be especially quick to grasp this point because they appreciate that the well-adapted mind is ultimately an organ of survival and reproduction…. factual realists detached from practical reality were not among our ancestors.
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This account of religion, then, is like Freud’s in that, like Freud, Wilson sees the cognitive processes that produce religious belief as not aimed at the production of true belief, but at belief that is adaptive by way of motivating those adaptive behaviors. Religious belief in general and Christian and Calvinistic belief in particular originate in
belief-producing processes that are aimed, not at the production of true belief, but at the production of belief that will motivate that behavior. And here someone who accepts Christian belief will be forced to demur, just as with Freud. For if Christian belief is in fact true, as, naturally enough, the Christian will think, it will be produced in us by cognitive processes that God has designed with the end in view of enabling us to see the truth of “the great things of the Gospel” (as Jonathan Edwards calls them). She will no doubt think that these processes typically involve what Calvin calls “the internal witness (or testimony) of the Holy Spirit” and what Aquinas calls “the internal instigation of the Holy Spirit.” And these processes, so the Christian thinks, will then be truth-aimed: they are aimed at enabling us to form these true beliefs about what God has done and about the way of salvation. So there is indeed a conflict between Wilson’s theory of religion and Christian belief.
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We turn now to a second area of conflict between Christian belief and science: historical Biblical criticism (HBC, as I’ll call it). There are striking parallels, in this regard, between HBC and evolutionary psychology.
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To see some of these parallels, we must begin with traditional Biblical commentary. Now classical Christians take the Bible
to be authoritative in one way or another. That is because they think of the Bible as a special word from the Lord; as they see it, God is the principal and ultimate author of the Bible. Of course the Bible is also a library, each of its books has a human author. But God has used these authors in such a way that what they write has the divine stamp of approval; hence the Bible—the whole Bible—is divinely inspired in such a way that its principle author is God. The Bible is a library, but it is also like a single book in that it has a single principal author. This is the source and warrant for the proposal that we can “interpret scripture with scripture”; if we find a certain obscurity in one of the epistles of Paul, for example, we can look for light, not just elsewhere in that epistle or to other writings of Paul, but also to the epistles of John and the Gospels. And the chief function of the Bible is to disclose to mankind God’s gospel—the good news of salvation through the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, himself both a human being but also the divine son of God, the second person of the trinity.

Now what the Lord teaches is of course trustworthy; therefore this entire book, so Christians think, is authoritative. Many questions arise: just how does this work? Just how does this inspiration happen? Just how can it be said that the Bible is divine discourse?
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This is not the place to enter those discussions. But even if the entire Bible is a word from the Lord, many parts of it are at best difficult to understand. It isn’t always easy to tell what the Lord is teaching in a given passage. What he is teaching is certainly true and to be accepted; but it may be hard indeed to see what he
is
teaching. In Colossians 1:24, for example, we read: “Now I rejoice in what was suffered for you, and I fill up in my flesh what is still lacking in regard to Christ’s afflictions, for the sake of his body which is the church.” But what could be
lacking in Christ’s afflictions, Christ’s sacrifice? Isn’t his sacrifice completely sufficient? How could it be otherwise? So how can we understand the passage in question, which seems to suggest that there was something lacking in Christ’s sacrifice?

Traditional Biblical commentary tries to answer questions like this. And the roll call of those who have engaged in this project is most impressive: the church fathers, Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin with his twenty-some volumes of commentary, Luther, and of course many more. This enterprise is characterized by the assumption I mentioned just above: that God is the principal author of all of the books of the Bible and that it is therefore authoritative. It’s important to see, furthermore, that those who engage in this enterprise also accept and take for granted, in the project, the main lines of Christian belief. Here there may be a bit of diversity; a Roman Catholic commentator will not take for granted precisely what a Protestant commentator does, but the agreement will be much more extensive than the disagreement. The aim is to discover what God is teaching in a given passage, and to do so in the light of these assumptions; the aim is not to determine whether what is taught is true, or plausible, or well supported by arguments. In Kant scholarship, for example, one tries to figure out what Kant means in a given passage—the Antinomies, or the transcendental deduction of the categories, or maybe more broadly how to understand the whole picture presented by one of the critiques. Having accomplished this task (at least to one’s own satisfaction), one quite properly goes on to ask whether Kant’s views are true or plausible, or whether he has made a good case for them. This last step is not appropriate in traditional Biblical commentary. Once you have established, as you think, what God is teaching in a given passage, what he is proposing for our belief, that settles the matter. You do not go on to ask whether it is true, or plausible, or whether a good case for it has been made. God is not required to make a case.

HBC (also called “higher criticism,” “historical criticism,” and “historical critical Biblical scholarship”) is a very different kettle of fish. This is an Enlightenment project, going back at least to Spinoza, who declared that “the rule for [Biblical] interpretation should be nothing but the natural light of reason which is common to all—not any supernatural light nor any external authority.”
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In pursuing this project, one doesn’t assume that the Bible is specially inspired by God, or that it contains anything like specifically divine discourse. Nor does one assume the main lines of Christian belief—that Jesus Christ is the divine son of God, for example, or that he arose from the dead, or that his suffering and death is in some way an atonement for human sin. Instead, you prescind from all of these theological beliefs; you bracket them; you set them aside for the purposes of the inquiry in question. Thus Jon Levenson:

Historical critics thus rightly insist that the tribunal before which interpretations are argued cannot be confessional or ‘dogmatic’; the arguments offered must be historically valid, able, that is, to compel the assent of
historians
whatever their religion or lack thereof, whatever their backgrounds, spiritual experiences, or personal beliefs, and without privileging any claim of revelation.
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Raymond Brown adds that HBC is “scientific biblical criticism”; it yields “factual results”; he intends his own contributions to be
“scientifically respectable,” and practitioners of HBC investigate the scriptures with “scientific exactitude.”
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The point here is precisely this effort to be
scientific
. Traditional Biblical commentary is not scientific, so the claim goes, exactly because it proceeds on the basis of the assumptions I mentioned above; HBC, therefore, eschews these assumptions in its effort to be scientific. We could also put it like this: traditional Biblical commentary depends on
faith
. The assumptions mentioned above, that is, the main lines of Christian belief including the thought that the Bible is divine discourse, are deliverances of faith; they are not deliverances of reason. Take reason to include the cognitive faculties that are employed in everyday life and ordinary history and science: perception, testimony, reason taken in the sense of a priori intuition together with deductive and probabilistic reasoning, Thomas Reid’s sympathy, by which we discern the thoughts and feelings of another, and so on; in its inquiries, HBC restricts itself to propositions that are delivered by these sources of belief, explicitly excluding any that are known or believed by faith and not solely by reason.
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For a long time there has been a good deal of tension between HBC and traditional Christians. In
Das Leben Jesu
, an early manifesto of HBC, David Strauss declares, “Nay, if we would be candid
with ourselves, that which was once sacred history for the Christian believer is, for the enlightened portion of our contemporaries, only fable.”
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To leap to the present, according to Luke Timothy Johnson:

The Historical Jesus researchers insist that the “real Jesus” must be found in the facts of his life before his death. The resurrection is, when considered at all, seen in terms of visionary experience, or as a continuation of an “empowerment” that began before Jesus’ death. Whether made explicit or not, the operative premise is that there is no “real Jesus” after his death.
³⁸

Sometimes those who engage in HBC wind up very far indeed from classical Christianity. Thus according to G. A. Wells, our name “Jesus,” as it turns up in the Bible, doesn’t trace back to anyone at all; it is like the name “Santa Claus.”
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So there wasn’t any such person as Jesus. John Allegro agrees that there was no such person as Jesus of Nazareth.
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Still, the name “Christ” is not empty. Christianity, he says, began as a hoax designed to fool the Romans and preserve the cult of a certain hallucinogenic mushroom (
Aminita muscaria
), and, he thinks, the name “Christ” is really a name of that mushroom. As engaging an idea as any is to be found in Thomas Sheehan’s
The First Coming
: Jesus, while neither merely legendary, nor actually a mushroom, was in fact an atheist, the first Christian atheist!
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And even if
we set aside such ludicrous excess, Van Harvey seems to be right: “So far as the biblical historian is concerned,… there is scarcely a popularly held traditional belief about Jesus that is not regarded with considerable skepticism.”
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Accordingly, some of those who engage in HBC come to conclusions wholly at variance with traditional or classical Christian belief. Many of these scripture scholars practice what we could call Troeltschian HBC, so called because of allegiance to principles enunciated by Ernst Troeltsch.
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These principles can be understood in more than one way, but taken the way his scripture scholarship followers understand him, they imply that proper scripture scholarship proceeds on the assumption that God never does anything specially; in particular there are no miracles, and God neither raised Jesus from the dead nor specially inspired the Biblical authors.
⁴⁴
In connection with the claim that special divine action is incompatible with modern science, I quoted Rudolf Bultmann:

The historical method includes the presupposition that history is a unity in the sense of a closed continuum of effects in which individual events are connected by the succession of cause and effect. This continuum, furthermore, cannot be rent by the interference of supernatural, transcendent powers.
⁴⁵

This applies equally to scripture scholarship: one who employs the historical method Bultmann is endorsing will not think of the Bible as in any way specially inspired by God.

But there are at least two kinds of HBC, at least two ideas as to what “scientific” biblical scholarship requires. A second kind of HBC, Duhemian HBC, takes as guiding principle, not that God never does anything special, but that the proper procedure, in scripture scholarship, is to use as evidence only what would be acceptable to everyone (or nearly everyone) who is party to the project.
⁴⁶
For example, according to E. P. Sanders, the idea is to rely only on “evidence on which everyone can agree.”
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A prime example of Duhemian scripture scholarship is John Meier’s fantasy of “an unpapal conclave” of Jewish, Catholic, Protestant and agnostic scholars, locked in the basement of the Harvard Divinity School library until they come to consensus on what historical methods can show about the life and mission of Jesus.
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The Duhemian scripture scholar won’t take for granted any theological, religious, or metaphysical assumptions that aren’t accepted by everyone in the relevant community.
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She won’t
assume either that God is the principal author of the Bible or that the main lines of the Christian story are in fact true; these are not accepted by all who are party to the discussion. She won’t take it for granted that Jesus rose from the dead, or that any other miracle has occurred, or even that miracles are possible; there are those party to the discussion that reject these claims. On the other hand, of course, Duhemian scripture scholarship can’t take it for granted that Christ did
not
rise from the dead or that
no
miracles have occurred, or that miracles are
im
possible.

Those who practice Duhemian HBC don’t ordinarily propose views in conflict with classical Christian belief. What they ordinarily propose as the most that can be said, however, is, from the standpoint of Christian belief, monumentally minimal. Thus A. E. Harvey proposes the following as beyond reasonable doubt from everyone’s point of view: